“I don’t know, Your Honor. Intending to take in the trial, or at least part of it?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t care to hazard a supposition.”
“I don’t believe you. I sense your hand in their presence here.”
“Your Honor, you flatter me to assign me such influence, but I assure you that I have no control over the movements of the mayor. Or Mr. Fisk. Their appearance here is as much a surprise to me as it is to you.”
“They are sitting on your client’s side. You don’t think this is going to influence the jury, seeing them sitting rooting for her?”
“I don’t know about that and I can’t help how the jury will react. Ms. West and Mr. Fisk are both related to the defendant.” He turned. “As Mr. Stier and, I believe, you, well know.”
Again the finger. “Don’t you presume to tell me what I know or don’t know.”
“Of course not, Your Honor. But regardless of your knowledge or lack of it, it’s only natural that as Ms. Townshend’s relatives, they should sit on the defense side of the gallery.”
Braun turned her angry eyes to the prosecutor. “Mr. Stier? Do you have anything to add to this conversation?”
The clean-cut and quite possibly cutthroat attorney, who had come in the door behind Hardy and remained slightly behind him until now, stepped up beside him, cleared his throat, but remained silent.
“Your Honor, with respect,” Hardy began, “first and primarily, this is a public courtroom. Anyone has a right to be here. We fought a revolution about this sort of thing. Further, there is an argument to be made that their presence might be calculated to combat the pretrial prejudice that the prosecution has been abetting throughout the lead-up to this trial.”
“What are you talking about?” Stier snapped.
Hardy kept himself at attention, eyes forward.
After a satisfying five seconds Braun finally came at him. “Did you hear Mr. Stier’s question, Mr. Hardy?”
“Of course, Your Honor.”
“Well?”
“I’m sorry. Well what, Your Honor?”
“I asked you if you’d heard Mr. Stier’s question.”
“Yes, of course, but you’ve instructed me many times to address my remarks only to the court. I’m trying to hone to the court’s protocol, Your Honor. As to Mr. Stier’s question, I’m certain he knows full well what I was talking about.”
“Would you care to enlighten the court what that is?”
“Certainly, Your Honor. It’s no secret that for the past several months Mr. Glass, the U.S. attorney here in San Francisco, has been prosecuting a campaign in the civil courts, in the media, and with a federal grand jury, trying to link my client and her husband to her brother and to the mayor and trying to implicate all the families in a money-laundering, dope-dealing, and racketeering conspiracy. That’s why I submitted all the questions for your voir dire about which of our prospective jurors follow the news closely. I had assumed you were aware of this, Your Honor.”
For an answer Braun turned to the prosecutor. “Mr. Stier?”
“Nonsense, Your Honor. It’s true that Jerry Glass has been following his own trail of malfeasance that appears to lead through some of these same individuals, including Mr. Hardy’s client, but to imply that we’ve colluded to prejudice—”
“Excuse me, Your Honor. I didn’t mean to imply any such thing. I meant to state it as established fact.”
Stier wheeled on Hardy. “That’s absurd.”
“To the contrary,” Hardy replied evenly, facing Braun. “It’s demonstrable, Your Honor. Debra Schiff, the homicide inspector who arrested my client, has been designated a special agent for Mr. Glass’s federal grand jury. Some would call that collusion.”
Braun glowered.
“But more to the point, Your Honor, Ms. West’s and Mr. Fisk’s right to be here, and my client’s right to have them here, is absolute. Of course, if you or Mr. Stier would like me to pass along a message to the mayor and a member of the Board of Supervisors that you want them to leave, I’d be happy to oblige. I’d actually be kind of interested to hear what they had to say to that.”
A longish pause. Then, “All right”—Braun bit off her words—“that’s quite enough. I won’t condone this type of bickering, either here or in my courtroom.” Hanging her head for a second, she shook it in disgust, then came back to the attorneys standing before her. “This situation infuriates me, but I don’t see any help for it. You gentlemen are excused. I’ll be out there again in just a minute.”
Word had evidently spread quickly, and by the time Hardy was back next to Maya at his table in the bullpen, there wasn’t a seat to be had in the gallery. A line stretched out through the door that led from the hallway into the courtroom, and Hardy was more than a little surprised to see Abe Glitsky standing in it, just inside the door, having come down to check out the show. He gave Hardy an infinitesimal nod.
Because they were scheduled to appear as witnesses and could not remain in the courtroom, Schiff and Bracco had both abandoned their earlier front-row seats in favor of a couple of reporters, who were among the number of people questioning both Harlen Fisk and Kathy West in what appeared to be a virtual impromptu press conference. Indeed, the gallery was fairly humming on all sides, so much so that the bailiff’s ringing call to order as Braun reentered the room and ascended to the bench went largely unheeded.
Hardy, up front, heard it and turned, but the noise behind him continued and, if anything, increased. Until Braun, standing, used her gavel, at first once, gently. And getting no response, then with a more imperious and forceful Bam! Bam! Bam!
“Order!” she called out. “Order in this court!”
Until gradually, finally, the place grew silent.
Braun waited until the last whisper had died, then put her gavel down and, still standing, leaned forward onto her hands, scowling down at the crowd. “This is a court of law,” she began, her voice strained with emotion. “There is no place in it for bedlam. I would ask those of you who have seats now to please take them, and for those of you standing along the sides, find a seat or I will be obliged to ask you to leave.”
After giving the gallery time to comply Braun finally took her seat. “Thank you. The court,” she went on, “recognizes Her Honor, the mayor of San Francisco, Kathy West, as well as City Supervisor Harlen Fisk, and welcomes them both to these proceedings.” In a convincing display of graciousness the judge nodded through a tight smile, then turned immediately to the prosecution table.
“Mr. Stier, are the People ready to begin their case?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Mr. Hardy, the defense?”
“Ready, Your Honor.”
“All right, then. Mr. Stier, you may begin.”
20
For all of his low-affect demeanor and appearance, Stier’s public persona projected the first hint of the enigmatic Paulie—a real authority that seemed based on equal parts confidence in who he was and the certainty of his position. He spoke in a normal, conversational tone with few oratorical flourishes, but his down-home sincerity created a simple eloquence that rang with conviction.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” He was standing just in front of and sideways to Hardy and Maya, facing the jury box. As he began, he held his hands in a relaxed manner down and slightly out in front of him, reminiscent of a shortstop in the ready position, from time to time bringing them up, clasping them for emphasis, or sometimes pointing a finger from one of them for clarity or effect.
“The evidence and facts in this case are fairly simple, straightforward, and unambiguous. They concern a significant drug-dealing operation and long-standing relationships among three individuals that for some unknown reason suddenly went bad, with tragic, in fact fatal, results for two of them. And they point to an inescapable conclusion—that the defendant in this case, Maya Townshend”—and here he turned and pointed a finger directly at her—“willfully murdered
her accomplice in her marijuana business, Dylan Vogler, and then several days later she willfully murdered another former accomplice in the marijuana business, Levon Preslee.
“Here’s how we know this.
“At nine forty-seven on the night of October twenty-sixth of last year, a young man who is one of the two victims in this case, Dylan Vogler, the manager of a coffee shop called Bay Beans West on Haight Street here in the city, placed a phone call to his employer, the defendant Maya Townshend. We don’t know precisely what he told her during that phone call, but whatever the message, it was important enough that Defendant first lied to the police about ever having received the call, and only when caught in the lie did she admit that it was enough to convince her to get up before dawn the next morning and drive to Bay Beans West.”
Hardy squirmed. Maya had not been caught in a lie but had admitted her deception to the police on her own, on his advice. He made a note to make the point later through Bracco or Schiff. But for the moment the accusation rang unchallenged in front of the jury.
Stier went on. “Less than one hour later, by the time it was just starting to get light, Mr. Vogler was dead, shot once in the chest at point blank range in the alley that runs behind Bay Beans West. There was no sign of a struggle. Police investigators discovered a gun in the alley from which one shot had recently been fired. One bullet was recovered. One shell casing was recovered. Both matched the gun. This gun belonged to Defendant. It was registered to her and her fingerprints were on it, as they were on cartridges inside the gun.
“So why did Defendant do it?
“They had been business partners for nearly ten years. Why did Defendant wake up on this particular Saturday morning and decide that she was going to have to kill Mr. Vogler? We may never know the precise reason. But we do know with certainty about the life of crime they were leading together, a life where violent death, even at the hands of partners and associates, is as common as this city’s morning fog in June.”
Stier smiled politely at his homespun witticism but didn’t pause. “At the time of his death,” he continued, “Mr. Vogler was wearing a backpack into which he’d packed fifty Ziploc snack bags, each containing a few grams to up to half an ounce of high-grade marijuana that he grew himself in his attic. It seems that Mr. Vogler used Bay Beans West, the coffee shop owned by Defendant and managed by himself, as a cover for a thriving marijuana business, a business whose books and accounting ledgers will show operated with the complete cooperation and collusion of Defendant.”
Maya was beginning to fidget and Hardy reached over and put a hand on her arm, squeezing gently. Everything Stier was saying was old news to both of them by now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t disconcerting hearing it laid out in a smoothly flowing narrative. And he didn’t want a member of the jury to pick up on Maya’s discomfort, which any one of them might construe as guilt.
For his own part Hardy wore a practiced expression of barely disguised disgust at this reading of the purported “facts.” Without lapsing into anything like true theatricality he let his head, as though of its own accord, shake back and forth ever so slightly whenever he sensed a juror checking him for his reaction.
Stier went on. “But Defendant wasn’t done yet. Her drug business went back a long way, and it would take more than one murder to keep it secure. Unfortunately, the murder of Dylan Vogler aroused the suspicion of another of her confederates named Levon Preslee. Until his death Mr. Preslee worked as a fund-raising executive at the American Conservatory Theater. Like Defendant and Mr. Vogler, he had attended the University of San Francisco in the nineteen nineties. While they were students there, several witnesses will testify that the three of them—Defendant and the two victims, Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee—first got involved together in a marijuana distribution business. Eventually, the law caught up to Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee and they were both convicted of robbery in connection with a dope deal gone bad and sentenced to prison.”
Hardy had fought vigorously to keep Vogler and Preslee’s prior marijuana dealings and the robbery away from the jury. There was no evidence, he’d argued, that connected Maya to that in any way. As with almost every other motion he had tried to make, Braun had brushed him aside: “Goes to the relationship among the parties,” she’d said, as though that either made sense or had something to do with the legal ruling.
Stier picked up the narrative again. “But not Defendant. The evidence will show that she remained a silent partner, and that silence had a price. In the early afternoon on Thursday, November first, Mr. Preslee got a phone call and abruptly left work at ACT in an agitated state. At two-oh-five that afternoon he placed a call to Defendant on his cell phone. Although Defendant—again—initially denied to police that she had ever been to Mr. Preslee’s apartment, DNA and her fingerprints will in fact place Defendant at Mr. Preslee’s home right around the time of his death.”
At their table Hardy’s hand closed around Maya’s wrist, and she cast him a downward look and let out a sigh.
This last bit of evidence, of course, had caused Maya’s arrest and was in many ways the low point of the past several months. The prosecution had developed its theory about the supposed relationships and possible blackmail between Vogler, Preslee, and Maya, but without any physical evidence tying Maya to Preslee’s home, even with his telephone call to her from his cell phone, there was no practical chance that she could ever be charged with Preslee’s murder. And possibly not even with Vogler’s.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stier went on, “we have here nearly the exact same pattern of behavior from Defendant in two related homicides. When she was in college, Defendant became involved with both victims in the sale of marijuana. You will hear evidence that Defendant both used and sold this and other drugs, and hear eyewitness testimony that her criminal partners, Vogler and Preslee, participated in robberies of other drug dealers.
“Since those days Defendant has masqueraded as an upper-class mother, a good wife, a regular churchgoer, and a law-abiding citizen. This new life was all-important to her for many reasons, but most particularly because she is a member of one of San Francisco’s most prominent political families.”
Here at last was Hardy’s first chance to stem the onslaught. “Objection, Your Honor,” he said. “Irrelevant and argumentative.”
Judge Braun frowned down at him and let him know how the wind was going to blow. “I think neither,” she said. “Overruled.”
Stier nodded at the bench, continuing smoothly. “Defendant paid dearly to keep her past secret. You will hear another eyewitness—the victim Mr. Vogler’s common-law wife—testify that her husband, with whom Defendant had been intimate, was blackmailing Defendant over an eight-year period. The blackmail mostly took the form of an exorbitant salary that he took as manager of Bay Beans West, but lately, Defendant’s financial records will reveal a pattern of money laundering through the coffee shop that corroborates the bare fact of the blackmail and provides a compelling motive for Mr. Vogler’s murder. And, in fact, for Mr. Preslee’s.
“The evidence overwhelmingly supports the People’s contention that Defendant killed both Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee because one had been blackmailing her and the other was about to do the same. She used her own gun to kill Mr. Vogler and—with that gun in police custody—used the nearest thing that came to hand, a kitchen cleaver, to kill Mr. Preslee. But both of these were premeditated acts that the state of California defines as first-degree murder, and that is the verdict I will ask you to deliver at the end of this trial. Thank you.”
Glitsky sat, feet up, behind his desk, which was getting pretty much littered with peanut shells. He’d opened the high blinds up sometime over the past six weeks since Hardy had last been up here, once it had become reasonable to assume that Zachary would recover, so the room was at last adequately lighted again.
Hardy and Frannie had been at the Glitskys’ home two weeks before, and while Zack still wore a football-type helmet during his every waking moment, to b
oth Hardys he seemed absolutely normal, back to what he had been before the accident.
It was Abe, Hardy felt, who had irrevocably changed. Not a man whom anybody would mistake for Mr. Sunshine in any event, Glitsky couldn’t seem to absorb the reality that Zachary was better, and that this was good news for him and for his life. Instead, his focus tended to be on his own responsibility for the accident in the first place; his general incompetence as a human being; his unlucky star. Whatever it was, much of what had always been at best a dark and cynical spark now had ceased to throw any light at all, and Hardy found it disturbing and wearying. Not that he was giving up on his best friend, but he was constantly trying to come up with ideas that might help restore Abe to something like what he used to be.
Stopping up here unexpectedly at lunchtime today on the first day of trial with a fresh supply of peanuts, for example. The peanuts that Glitsky had always kept in his desk drawer—top left until Hardy had surreptitiously moved them one day to top right—had run out just before Christmas, never to be replaced. So even though he had his own opening argument to deliver when court resumed after lunch, he stopped by to drop off the gift and chat for a few minutes.
And it had started, of course, with a discussion of Stier’s opening, which Glitsky thought was pretty compelling. “Admittedly, though,” he said, popping a nut, “I’m the choir he was preaching to. You probably didn’t really want to ask me.”
“Oh, right, I forgot for a minute. What was the part, though, that convinced you?”
“Of what?”
“That Maya’s guilty.”
Glitsky’s hands rested together on his stomach. He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got one for you. What part of it didn’t you believe?”
“I believed all of it,” Hardy said.
“There you go. Don’t worry about it. You’re due for a loss anyway. Nat”—Glitsky’s eighty-something father—“says the occasional loss strengthens the spirit.”
A Plague of Secrets Page 18